It's XP Home, and I guess I wasn't clear enough.

My wife was doing windows updates, then the machine asked to reboot.
She clicked "ok", and when it rebooted it brought up the usename and
password window. When she typed in her account and password, it would
log in, and then immediately save settings and logout, ending up back
at the login window. All accounts on this machine do this. You type
your password, up comes your personal backround for a sec, then it
saves setting and logs you out.

We got an XP Home Upgrade CD (I have no idea which computer it belongs
to as we have five in the house). I was able to get the System Restore
Console up from "boot from CD", and then login with "no password". Now
we can "see" our files on C and D, but we cannot copy or access them.

What should we do now? Are we completely screwed because windows
update screwed up our password file? Or, is there something else we
should try from the System Restore Console?

Thanks...

On Sun, 01 Jan 2006 15:09:53 GMT, markxyz59@cox.net (Mark) wrote:

>I posted earlier about Windows Updates screwing up and not accepting
>any passwords (it would login and then quickly log out). Good News: I
>was able to get the Recovery Console to give us access to the disk. We
>can see C and D drives and all files are there.
>
>Is there a way to clobber/reset passwords from the command prompt?
>
>Our first instinct was to stick a USB Drive in and copy stuff, but the
>USB drivers don't appear to be there on the recovery console.
>